ITU Telecommunication Channel Available on YouTube

One important aspect of the telecommunications revolution that took place in South Korea during the 1980s was that it led directly into a more active international role for the country.  The highly successful 1988 Seoul Olympics gave a big boost to the country's so-called "Northern Policy" of opening up relations with China, the former Soviet Union and socialist bloc countries in Eastern Europe. (see my book with Heung Soo Park, Global Television and the Politics of the Seoul Olympics). At the same time, South Korea's economic growth put in in a position to more actively participate in ITU (International Telecommunications Union) projects, as well as those of the OECD, which it joined in 1996.  It became an active participant in the World Summit on the Information Society and in global efforts to help eliminate the digital divide.
In the above context, I was pleased to find that there is an ITU Telecommunication Channel on YouTube. You may enjoy, as I did, getting to know this channel by viewing the following video.

I can see from a number of Korean-language annotated entries that people here have taken an interest in this channel.  Through this blog and related sites, I hope to organize links to the major YouTube channels relating to telecommunications, and in particular the Korean experience. A word of warning. Don't expect a tremendous amount of quality and substance in these telecoms-related videos. That is one reason I want to review them, to sift the wheat from the chaff as it were.

The ITU's Digital Opportunity Index--Korea Ranks Number One in the World

For the past several years, South Korea has ranked number one in the world on the ITU's Digital Opportunity Index (DOI). For that reason alone it is worth understanding what this index is and what it measures. The index is based on 11 ICT indicators, grouped in 3 clusters: opportunity, infrastructure and utilization, as illustrated in the accompanying graphic (click the graphic for larger version).

Moreover, the DOI is an outgrowth of the World Summit on the Information Society meetings organized by the ITU. Among the dominant concerns at these meetings was the digital divide and the degree to which developing as well as developed nations could achieve digital opportunity. In the Geneva phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, participants decided that, in an ideal world, digital opportunity would mean:

• The whole population having easy access to ICTs at affordable prices;
• All homes equipped with ICT devices;
• All citizens having mobile ICT devices; and
• Everyone using broadband.

As one can see from a glance at the world map, digital opportunity currently varies greatly from country to country and regionally. A couple of points deserve to be emphasized about South Korea's world-leading ranking on the DOI index. First, the index contains a strong measure of infrastructure. The presence and pervasiveness of an infrastructure, or we might say the ubiquity of a network, is a necessary precondition for the equitable flow of information among all citizens in an information society. Second, the "opportunity" which concerns the ITU is opportunity for all citizens, to access information, not simply the question of whether the new networks contribute to economic growth. Third, this index does not incorporate measures of literacy and education, but the inclusion of such data would in all likelihood bolster South Korea's standing. Fourth and finally, one would hope that somehow an index like DOI could be related to the language in which information is accessed, processed and used. The incoming administration in Seoul argues that English has become the lingua franca and therefore Korea needs to mount a major effort to improve English ability precisely in order to improve productivity. If 90 percent of the information on the internet today is in English, is fluency in that language a pre-requisite to true digital opportunity?

Information Age Indices--Where Does Korea Stand?

This month another index has been announced, the purpose of which is to measure progress toward the information society. The development of this index, called the "Connectivity Scorecard," was funded by Nokia-Siemens Networks and its development was led by Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School. The developers took as two points of reference, the ITU's Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) and the Economist's E-readiness index. A basic premise of the new index is that the DOI and E-readiness indices stress only infrastructure and usage and slight "the skills and complementarities required to drive communications networks as an engine of growth. That is, it is “smart” usage which helps make Connectivity a driver of productivity gains and hence economic growth." (See The Connectivity Scorecard.) What caught my eye was the statement in this report that "Korea, a star performer on other indexes, finishes 10th largely because very high performance in infrastructure is not matched by correspondingly high scores on usage measures, especially by businesses." At first glance, this statement did not seem to mesh with my understanding of what is going on here in South Korea. To be blunt, it makes me wonder about the usage measures employed in The Connectivity Scorecard and whether they treat countries like Korea fairly, given that the majority of network activity here is carried out in the Korean language (한글 하고 아국마로). The development of international indices to measure the degree to which countries are networked, the extent to which these networks are used, and how that relates to economic, political and social development is no doubt important. However, it seems strange that South Korea would suddenly drop in the rankings with this new index. Rest assured that, as time permits, I will return to this topic and compare the major international indices in some detail.

Broadband Internet in South Korea

Broadband internet penetration, as measured by the OECD, the ITU and other organizations, indicates the number of internet subscriptions per 100 population. As indicated by the chart in my previous post, South Korea led the world by this measure for the first few years of the new century. It also led, and continues to lead, by another important measure--the percentage of households connected to broadband internet. As of September 2007, 90.1% of South Korean households had broadband connections, the highest percentage in the world. As shown in the chart above, other countries are catching up, led by several of the smaller nations of Scandinavia and Europe. South Korea's high household access to the internet is boosted by the extremely high concentration of its population in Seoul and a few other large cities. Beyond that, even in smaller towns a large portion of the population resides in the large apartment complexes that have, for some years now, all been wired for 100 Mbps internet connections. With such a high level of household connections to fast internet service, it stands to reason that usage levels will increase and that seems to be the case, as shown in the second graphic below. Over half of the South Korean population now uses the internet more than ten hours per week.

Information Highways: Korea's Broadband Networks

Anyone with an interest in Korea's telecommunications development and its current status as a world-leader in broadband infrastructure, will want to consult the OECD's broadband portal. This portal makes available data for all of the OECD countries and a variety of studies that help to make sense of the information revolution around the world. South Korea has been an active participant in these new OECD studies.

In an earlier post, I commented on the tendency of mainstream media reports to lag or misrepresent actual developments in South Korea. The OECD data on broadband internet penetration from 2001 through mid-2007 help us to understand why. In terms of this particular measure, South Korea was number one in the world until 2005, when some small Scandinavian and European countries caught up. The "suddenness" of South Korea's rise as a broadband internet power is probably what threw the mainstream media off course. It simply didn't fit within the story line used to report about that nattion.

There is much more information to digest on the OECD broadband portal, quite a bit of which relates to the South Korean experience. I plan to comment on it in future posts.